An eBay seller and a fishing manufacturing company and its director were sentenced in a crown court for selling counterfeit fly fishing line.
Test purchases of fly line by a trading standards officer and a number of fly fishing line companies around the UK established that Bailey was selling fake lines under the brand names Rio, Snowbee, Greys, Hardy, and Loop.
LINK (via: Minister FM)
Now, if they had pleaded “We were only getting our own back on the Americans for stealing our rare feathers from the Natural History Museum.”, they might have got away with it….
I remember being given a big plastic bag of unboxed Cortland and Scientific Anglers lookalike lines about ten years ago. Every one of them was pretty well uncastable, with some of the floaters soon becoming slow sinkers when wet and the finish of others peeling and flaking off the core after being left in their ziplok bag packaging in a cupboard drawer for a few weeks . They were excellent for tying up the tomatoes and chillies in my garden for a few summers, however.